The competing demands on museums will increase as the number and diversity of visitors continues to grow. As they vie as never before with a broad panoply of new centres of interest, museums face a host of demands from a clientele ever more avid for stimulation, entertainment and challenge.
—N. Graburn, 19981
Q: |
What I would like to ask you and what I would want to talk about is what do you really enjoy doing? |
A: |
I enjoy doing lots of things. I enjoy walking on the beach, I enjoy working outside in the garden, well, I don’t really have a garden, but I have flower pots and I love flowers. I love tutoring the children in the afternoon in my house. I enjoy cooking. I enjoy being able to help other people to, you know, to understand a new way of doing things. I enjoy being able to help people walk through the health system which is very complicated especially if you don’t have money, so that is very rewarding. I enjoy every part of the day because I am not sure if I’m going to be here tomorrow, here in life, I enjoy every day like it would be the last one. I have a couple alarms in the health department so that helped me to realize that I might not be here tomorrow so I enjoy everything I do, even if I know I am healthy now but you never know, things are like that sometimes.… and I enjoy spending time with my husband. Ron, my husband, he’s also involved in the community very, very much so the time that we have together is at nights and on weekends sometimes weekends because sometimes he has meetings. He is coaching the high school for track and football, so you know sometimes on the weekends he has games. So there are weeks when he needs to go, I will see him late or maybe the next day if he’s going to these things. |
Wow, you both sound really busy! |
|
A: |
Yes. We have my life, his life, and our life. And it doesn’t involve either of us at work. So we have our time together that we enjoy very much. |
Q: |
And what is the “our life”—what kind of things do you do together? |
A: |
We take walks, and we like to take short trips on the weekends; go to different restaurants and walk in the little towns, and take pictures… and sometimes we cook together and we’re in the kitchen together and that’s kind of fun, and then eat together and talk about what happened in our day and this or that.… |
Q: |
You mentioned that you travel with your husband sometimes. |
A: |
Yes, sometimes we do just small things like we go to Lincoln City there is an amazing restaurant there called Wildflower, very good restaurant. |
Q: |
So, when you go on those trips do you go to places like museums or historical monuments? |
A: |
Oh yeah, we like to do that a lot. |
Q: |
That’s great… What is that you like most about that experience? |
A: |
Well, it’s a learning activity because usually if you go to a museum it’s something that you will want to know. So you learn about what is in there, history, different information, and it’s a learning process. I am very curious, I like to know why things are like they are. |
Q: |
So, that’s why you go? |
A: |
Yeah, [because I’m a curious person]. |
This excerpt is from an interview with Maria, a 65-70-year-old Mexican-American woman. Maria and her husband Ron are well-educated but live on a relatively modest income, and clearly, Maria appears to live a very full and satisfying life. She is active in a wide range of volunteer as well as paid activities in her small town. She tutors Hispanic school children in her home in the afternoons, she works for a breast cancer awareness clinic, and she helps other recent Latino/a immigrants, particularly those with low income, navigate their way through the health care system. Maria also spends time with her husband, cooks, gardens, walks, and visits museums. As this excerpt reveals, like so many others living in the twenty-first century, Maria is a very busy person and when describing the things she likes to do, she doesn’t readily distinguish between the work-related aspects of her life and those that are purely leisure-related. Mixed together are activities that are “relaxing” like growing flowers with those that are “active” like walking, and those that are consumption-oriented like going out to dinner and those that are learning-related like going to museums. In contrast with life in the twentieth century, where the boundaries between work and leisure were firmly drawn, in the Knowledge Age of the early twenty-first century, work, consumption, learning and leisure are all tightly interwoven.2 All of this has major implications for our understanding of the museum visitor experience. In order to fully understand why people choose to visit museums, we need to see museum-going first and foremost as a leisure experience. Thus, to understand museum-going as a leisure experience we need to understand more about the broader leisure landscape of the twenty-first century. Once we have that perspective, we can specifically situate museum-going within that context.
LEISURE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The public has always strived to devote some part of their life to leisure pursuits, but as the world of work has become centered around mental rather than physical labor, more of the public’s leisure time is filled with experiences designed to support a range of mental diversions rather than just physical relaxation. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the public primarily used leisure as a mechanism for escaping from the physical and sometimes, mental exhaustion of work. Classic responses were the escapism fostered by Disney and other theme parks or a week spent on vacation “doing nothing.” Although these leisure diversions are still popular, their market share is declining. Their main competition in the early years of the twenty-first century has been an entirely different form of leisure experience which includes adventure tourism such as whitewater rafting or mountain climbing and more intellectual pursuits such as visits to historic and natural settings and museums. In the twenty-first century, larger numbers of people view leisure as an opportunity to expand their understanding of themselves and their world.3 Rather than relaxing under a palm tree at the beach, people consider their leisure time as an opportunity to be energized by immersing themselves in new ideas, spaces, and experiences.
The dominance of the former model is clearly waning as revealed by a recent Canadian Tourism Council’s investigation of American leisure time activities.4 In this study, Americans said that they were seeking beaches (54%), culture (51%), followed by adventures (41%) on a vacation. Furthermore, 40% of American leisure travelers stated that they travel with the purpose of visiting and educating themselves about their destination’s unique attractions. The survey also revealed the growing trend of women traveling alone, more than half (52%) of whom said they were traveling in order to experience other cultures by visiting ruins and museums. These statistics would certainly suggest that a large percentage of Americans, and by extension others within the developed world and among the growing middle classes of the developing world, see culture, learning, and self-fulfillment as major leisure goals. Although there have always been individuals who held such values, the fact that so many people now hold these values is historically unprecedented.5
One consequence of these major shifts in both the quantity and quality of leisure expectations has been an explosion in the number of leisure options available to the public. There are more places, ways, and opportunities for leisure than ever before and they all compete for a portion of an individual’s limited leisure time. As exemplified by Maria, the typical individual finds his or her leisure time divided between a myriad of activities, most of which need to be “shoe-horned” into busy lives and schedules. Whereas Americans, for example, used to regularly set aside one to two weeks every year for a vacation, now most take vacations in the form of three-or four-day getaways as people feel crunched for time.6 However, now as before, all leisure decision-making is increasingly a series of value-related cost-benefit decisions in which time plays a crucial role. Whether it’s a short trip to visit the downtown mall or a museum, or a long trip as part of a tourist-type experience that might include many activities, including museum-going, people are “calculating” the value of the experience—how will an investment of time in this activity maximally benefit me and my loved ones?
Assigning Leisure Value
One of the consequences of the major economic, social, and political transitions in the twenty-first century has been that more people than ever before in places like Western Europe, Japan, North America, and Australia now enjoy unprecedented levels of affluence, health care, and public safety. The result has been that increasing numbers of people have been liberated from the privations of earlier centuries. Using psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a model, most people in the developed world are no longer struggling to achieve the basic physiological and safety needs that occupy the bottom of the needs pyramid.7 They are now able to focus on achieving “higher levels” of need—love and security, self-esteem, and self-fulfillment, the latter of which is the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy. In the twentieth century, a person’s struggle to move up Maslow’s hierarchy was primarily enacted through work; today these strivings are primarily enacted through leisure.8 Although millions of people in the developing world still struggle at the bottom of the pyramid, ever-growing middle classes now exist throughout Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. These are the regions of the world that have seen the greatest growth in the creation of museums and other comparable “value-added” leisure options.
What is it that would make a leisure product or service rise above the crowded field? Rather than selecting products merely on their utility, today’s consumers make decisions on a product’s ability to satisfy personal desires and lifestyles. So complete has been this transformation that today a majority of the world’s affluent consumers have largely exhausted the things they need to purchase; instead, they now focus on what they want to purchase.9 We engage in leisure experiences that promise to make us happier, better partners or parents, or more knowledgeable and competent individuals. We seek experiences that nourish and rejuvenate the spirit and generally make us feel more fulfilled. But because time is increasingly the single limiting determinant of our leisure, we engage in a blending of goals and activities through a kind of consumptive multi-tasking.10 Thus, more and more of our shopping, eating, and vacationing experiences are being packaged in ways that enable us to bundle leisure together with “cultural and intellectual enrichment”—a search for the authentic and the self-fulfilling.11 We have begun to flee the mega-malls in favor of historic areas with ample shopping opportunities such as Annapolis, Maryland, the Provence area of France, and the wine regions of Napa Valley that allow us to experience a greater sense of place. We find ourselves attracted to ethnic restaurants, especially those with a high degree of realism that “talk” to us through their menus of their cultural traditions, or offer cooking classes so as to keep their cooking traditions alive. Even the historically hedonistic cruise industry now provides evening lectures by experts and guided tours of cultural sites at each of their port-of-calls. Twenty-first century leisure has increasingly become about building and supporting identity-related needs.
Leisure and Identity
Theoretically, it would make sense that leisure time activities which inherently involve a large measure of choice and control should be particularly amenable to identity-building. Leisure researcher John Kelly made this point when he asserted that leisure is particularly potent in the self-affirmation process since it is a self-defined, intrinsically motivated activity.12 The perception of choice and control appears to be fundamental to a heightened sense of self-actualization, which in turn sustains the integrity of personal identity.13 In essence, we affirm who we are through the active selection and participation in leisure activities. Perhaps the clearest expression of these ideas was made by two leisure researchers, Lois Haggard and Dan Williams, who stated, “Through leisure activities we are able to construct situations that provide us with the information that we are who we believe ourselves to be, and provide others with information that will allow them to understand us more accurately.”14 In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, leisure researcher Geof Godbey wrote that
leisure should resemble the best aspects of work: challenges, skills and important relationships. Leisure has its hierarchy. At the lowest level, it’s a search for diversion, higher up it’s a search for pleasure and, at the top it’s a search for meaning. It’s not that diversion is bad, but in terms of human growth, it’s inferior to activities that are more pleasurable—and they're inferior to activities that are more meaningful.15
As the twenty-first century progresses, the focus of most of the affluent citizens of the world has continued to inexorably shift from the workplace to leisure, from striving for survival to searching for personal fulfillment and satisfaction. Leisure in the Knowledge Age has become ever more centered upon a quest for something larger and something more personally fulfilling. The quest for identity, enacted through leisure, is and will continue to be a dominant theme of this new century. Each individual is seeking to build his or her personal and group identities, using his or her ever-expanding, but ever more precious leisure time for accomplishing this. In some cases the leisure pursuit of identity is overt, as when visiting an ashram or attending an evening Bible group. More often, though, the leisure-time pursuit of identity is more mundane, embedded in such activities as the weekly visit to the gym to keep in good physical shape or the bi-annual visit to the museum in order to stay on top of what’s happening in the world of art or science. And befitting a Knowledge Age, more and more of our identity-laden leisure activities come with some kind of learning overlay. At the gym we are constantly trying to learn what new equipment, exercises, or routines will best maintain our physical health while at the museum we strive to learn about what new trends in art, history, or science will influence our lives in the years to come.
Anthropologist Nelson Graburn anticipated these changes more than a quarter century ago when he stated that “leisure is displacing work from the center of modern social arrangements.”16 Graburn foresaw a society in which leisure-oriented activities, particularly those focused on personal growth and development, would soon become the dominant form of daily activity; we are not quite there yet, but we are getting closer to that reality every day. As we continue to transition into the Knowledge Age, we will find that the most sought-after leisure goods and services will be those with the richest potential for combining a high degree of self-enrichment and self-actualization with a high degree of convenience. I will argue that this brings us full circle back to the central question of this book—how can we understand the museum visitor experience? I believe the only way to really understand the museum visitor experience is to begin with the question of why anyone would visit a museum in the first place. When we look at museum-going through the twenty-first century leisure lens described in this chapter, we can begin to understand why museum-going has become one of the most popular leisure activities in the world. As Nelson Graburn correctly predicted thirty years ago, museums are well-positioned to benefit from the post-industrial societal trend towards more meaningful, learning-oriented leisure.
LEISURE NEEDS AND DECISIONS
As the interview with Maria reveals, like so many others today, she is motivated to visit museums because they satisfy very specific leisure-related needs. In Maria’s case, it revolves around her self-perception that she is a curious person and museums represent good places to visit for satisfying curiosity. Leisure researchers became interested in the relationship be tween leisure and motivation starting in the late 1960s because it promised to help them understand why people engage in leisure behavior.
Leading leisure researcher John Kelly argued that situational factors of association, frequency, location, and scheduling were highly correlated with the kinds of leisure chosen by North American adults. The type of activity was one significant element in the meaning derived from participation. From his mid-1970’s perspective, Kelly suggested that cultural activities, especially at home, were most likely to be engaged in for their recuperative values. Sports were considered to have meanings intrinsic to participation; entertainment and community activity were much more motivated by social relations; travel was to be engaged in for its contrast to employment; and family activities were to be motivated by an individual’s perceived role, such as what it takes to be a good father or mother.17 Researchers Jacob Beard and Ragheb Mounir identified six components of perceived motivation/satisfaction of leisure participants:
Psychological–a sense of freedom, enjoyment, involvement, and challenge;
Educational–intellectual challenge and knowledge gains;
Social–rewarding relationships with other people;
Relaxation–relief from strain and stress;
Physiological–fitness, health, weight control, and wellbeing; and
Aesthetic–response to pleasing design and beauty of environments.18
One of the most powerful approaches to thinking about the important role that expectations and motivations play in leisure was spearheaded by recreation researchers B.L. Driver and S. Ross Tocher who developed what was known as the “experiential approach.”19 Later extended by Driver and a number of his associates, the experiential approach suggested that a leisure experience should not be viewed merely as an activity such as hiking, fishing, camping, or shopping, but rather “should be conceptualized as a psychophysiological experience that is self-rewarding, occurs during nonobligated free time, and is the result of free-choice.”20 Approaching leisure from this perspective is strikingly different than the typical view which primarily focused on the “what” someone did as opposed to “why.” In particular, this view of leisure posited that people pursue engagement in recreation and leisure in order to satisfy inner needs or problems.21
In the ensuing years, Driver and his colleagues were able to generate a whole range of motivations that seemed to drive recreational behaviors. In particular, they defined what they referred to as the myriad “packages” or “bundles” of psychological outcomes people desired from a recreation engagement.22 In all, they defined 15 major, overarching motivational categories that described why people engage in recreational activities, in particular those in the outdoors. They also developed a range of subcategories within many of these major categories:
ACHIEVEMENT/STIMULATION
Reinforcing Self-image
Social Recognition
Skill Development
Competence Testing
Excitement
Endurance
Telling Others
AUTONOMY/LEADERSHIP
Independence
Autonomy
Control-Power
RISK TAKING
EQUIPMENT
FAMILY TOGETHERNESS
SIMILAR PEOPLE
Being with Friends
Being with Similar People
NEW PEOPLE
Meeting New People
Observing Other People
LEARNING
General Learning
Exploration
Geography Study
Learning More about Nature
ENJOY NATURE
Scenery
General Nature Experience
INTROSPECTION
Spiritual
Introspection
NOSTALGIA
PHYSICAL FITNESS
PHYSICAL REST
ESCAPE PERSONAL-SOCIAL PRESSURES
Tension Release
Slow Down Mentally
Escape Role Overloads
Many of these categories could easily apply to museum-going, but which ones? At the same time, several museum researchers, most independently of each other, attempted to go beyond demographic categorizations of visitors to more thoughtfully determine what motivated people to visit museums, and in some cases, think about the implications on the visitor experience of these motivations. I believe it’s worth the time to briefly review some of the key efforts in this regard. As we’ll see, all of these studies converge around just a few main reasons that people say motivate them to visit museums—reasons representing a subset of the categories established by Driver et al.
WHY PEOPLE SAY THEY GO TO MUSEUMS: A REVIEW OF THE RESEARCH
Molly Hood
In the 1980s, Molly Hood did a series of ground-breaking investigations of visitor and non-visitor motivations for visiting museums.23 In line with the research of Beard and Mounir, she argued that there were six major criteria by which individuals judge leisure experiences: 1) being with people, or social interaction; 2) doing something worthwhile; 3) feeling comfortable and at ease in one’s surroundings; 4) having a challenge of new experiences; 5) having an opportunity to learn; and 6) participating actively. According to Hood, the selection of leisure time activity normally involves some combination of these six criteria, but normally not all six. In her study of the Toledo Art Museum, Hood identified three distinct populations of visitors: 1) frequent visitors (3 or more visits per year); 2) occasional participants (visiting once or twice per year); and 3) non participants. Hood found that these three populations had very different leisure criteria profiles.
The frequent art museum visitors both highly valued all six of the leisure attributes and found that museums were places that could provide satisfaction on all six criteria. Of the six attributes, though, three were particularly important to this group—opportunities to learn, challenge of new experiences, and doing something worthwhile during leisure time. Hood found that these particular leisure attributes were less important to non-participants (those who never visited the art museum) while the attributes of being with people, or social interaction, feeling comfortable and at ease in one’s surroundings, and participating actively were most important. They perceived that these attributes were usually not present in museums. Finally, occasional participants were much more like non-participants than they were like frequent visitors. They too favored being with people, or social interaction; feeling comfortable and at ease in one’s surroundings, and participating actively. Hood concluded that the non-participant and occasional participant groups seemed to equate leisure with “relaxation,” rather than the more active, intense, learning-oriented experience favored by regular visitors.
A decade later, as part of a major national research study, I replicated Hood’s approach in order to better understand the leisure time use of museums by African Americans.24 In my study of 728 individuals, which included both African and European Americans and represented the same range of museum usage as Hood’s group—from non-users to frequent users—the non-museum goers were not significantly different than those who said they occasionally or regularly visited museums. Meanwhile, my non-user group’s most preferred leisure attributes were also different than Hood’s; their preferences were: feeling comfortable and at ease in one’s surroundings, doing something worthwhile, and being with people. The number one criteria of all my subjects—black and white, frequent visitor, occasional visitor, or non-visitor—was feeling comfortable and at ease in one’s surroundings. Not only that, doing something worthwhile emerged as key for all groups—a criteria that only emerged in Hood’s frequent visitor group. More than half of all individuals in my sample also valued learning, and nearly all also valued social interactions. Thus, either there were problems with Hood’s initial data, my data, or in the span of ten years, leisure patterns in America had changed. My belief, then and now, was that the last explanation was most likely correct.
As outlined at the beginning of this chapter, the last decades of the twentieth century were a period of rapid and profound change in leisure values, including a significant expansion of the value of doing worthwhile, value-added experiences such as free-choice learning. That said, the fundamental assumptions of Hood’s research are still valid. People make leisure decisions for one of many personal reasons—reasons that have little to do with their demographics and everything to do with their personal values and interests. As an aside, my research determined that the single largest influence on the relative disparity between white and black museum visitation was historical patterns of leisure behavior. The absence of a childhood museum-going pattern in large percentages of the African American community disproportionately influenced their present museum-going behavior. Of course, latent racism and socio-economic disparities were also part of the reason for current differences in museum-going, but these reasons did not appear to be as important contributors as some had assumed.
Theano Moussouri
For her doctoral dissertation Theano Moussouri investigated the question of why people visit museums.25 She concluded, based upon a thorough review of the literature, coupled with open-ended interviews with hundreds of visitors to a range of museums in England, that all the various reasons given for visiting museums could be grouped into one of six different general categories. According to Moussouri, these six categories of motivations reflected the functions a museum is perceived to serve in the social/cultural life of visitors. She gave the categories the following generic names: 1) Education; 2) Entertainment; 3) Social event; 4) Life-cycle; 5) Place; and 6) Practical issues.
Education represented a category of reasons related to the aesthetic, informational, or cultural content of the museum and was the most frequently cited motivation for visiting. Most visitors mentioned that they visit museums in order to learn or find out more about something, occasionally something in particular, more often just “stuff” in general. Occasionally, visitors also expressed a desire for an emotional/aesthetic experience. These latter reasons were also grouped under the Education category. Entertainment, the second most frequently cited motivation, referred to a set of leisure-related reasons for visiting a museum. Most visitors mentioned that they go to museums in their free time in order to have fun and enjoy themselves, and/or to see new and interesting things in a relaxing and aesthetically pleasing setting.
Social event was another common reason given for museum-going. Museum-going was widely perceived as a “day out” for the whole family, a special social experience, and a chance for family members or friends to enjoy one another separately and together. A related but separate category was what Moussouri called Life-cycle. Distinct from normal social experience, some people seemed to view museum-going as important marker events, taking place at certain phases in one’s life, usually related to childhood (e.g., “I was brought to the museum as a child and now I’m bringing my child to the museum”).
Place was that cluster of reasons given by individuals when they categorized museums as leisure/cultural/recreational destinations emblematic of a locale or region. Many people visit museums for this reason, including individuals on holiday or day trips or those who have out-of-town guests. Finally, the Practical side of a museum visit also factored into some people’s motivations for visiting. Practical factors such as weather, proximity to the museum, time availability, crowd conditions, and the entrance fee contributed to some visitors’ decision-making process.
In follow-up research, Moussouri, statistician Doug Coulson, and I found that the public not only usually had combinations of these motivations, but that the nature of these motivations directly correlated with their subsequent experiences and learning.26 For example, individuals who had a dominant Education motivation for visiting the museum learned different things than did those individuals who had a dominant Entertainment visit motivation, though both groups learned. These data reinforced the observation of psychologist Scott Paris that motivation and learning within the museum are not only connected, but that in order to understand visitor’s museum motivations and learning, one needs to view both of these constructs in their broadest sense.27 It also led Moussouri, Coulson, and me to conclude that Education and Entertainment were not two ends of a single continuum, but totally independent dimensions. The fact was that, almost without exception, visitors shared both a desire to learn and to have fun—though for some learning was more important than fun and for others fun more important than learning. Depending upon that relationship, different uses of time and different learning resulted.
Zahava Doering and Andrew Pekarik
In the late 1990s, Zahava Doering, Andrew Pekarik, and their colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution became very interested in understanding what motivated people to visit the various Smithsonian museums. They developed an empirical list of experiences that they believed captured the things that museum visitors generally found satisfying about their museum experiences.28 Doering and her colleagues separated visitor experiences into four distinct categories—object experiences–focusing on something outside the visitor, for example, seeing the “real thing” or seeing rare or valuable things; cognitive experiences–focusing on the interpretive or intellectual aspects of the experience; introspective experiences–focusing on private feelings and experiences, such as imagining, reflecting, reminiscing, and connecting; and social experiences–focusing on interactions with friends, family, other visitors, or museum staff.
Their investigations suggested that different types of museums, and different exhibitions within museums, appeared to elicit these experiences to varying extents. In fact, Doering and Pekarik went so far as to suggest that visitors don’t enter museums as “blank slates,” but bring with them well-formed interests, knowledge, opinions, and museum-going experiences. In particular, Doering and Pekarik suggested that visitors enter with a desire to experience one of these four types of visitor outcomes. They referred to these as the visitor’s “entry narratives.” If we start with the idea that learning, broadly defined, is a major outcome of museum experiences, then it follows that different learning outcomes are likely to be directly attributable to different entry narratives. In addition, visitors’ entering narratives will be self-reinforcing. Entry narratives will direct learning and behavior because visitors’ perceptions of satisfaction will be directly related to experiences that resonate with their entering narrative. This idea paralleled the results of Moussouri, Coulson, and myself that visitors’ entering motivations influenced their learning outcomes.
Jan Packer and Roy Ballantyne
Jan Packer, in her dissertation research, also investigated the relationship between museum visitor motivation and learning. The resulting paper that she wrote with her major professor Roy Ballantyne reports on a subset of her data, in particular 300 visitors, 100 each at an Australian museum, art gallery, and aquarium.29 These researchers asked the visitors to rate the outcomes they hoped to derive from their visit. A factor analysis of the resulting responses revealed five categories of visit motivations: 1) Learning and discovery; 2) Passive enjoyment; 3) Restoration; 4) Social interaction; and 5) Self-fulfillment. Packer and Ballantyne described Learning and discovery as the desire to discover new things, expand knowledge, be better informed, and experience something new or unusual. As found by Moussouri in her initial work, this was the most common category. Also closely mirroring Moussouri’s data, the second most common category was Passive enjoyment–the desire to enjoy oneself, to be pleasantly occupied, and to feel happy and satisfied. Restoration–the desire to relax mentally and physically, to have a change from routine and recover from stress and tension, was also a very important motivation for some visitors in Packer and Ballantyne’s sample. Social interaction–the desire to spend time with friends or family, interact with others and build relationships, also emerged as a category, as it has for all who have investigated museum-going. And finally, Packer and Ballantyne identified a category of motivation they called Self-fulfillment–the desire to make things more meaningful, challenge abilities, feel a sense of achievement, and develop self-knowledge and self-worth. As predicted by Doering and Pekarik and identified by Moussouri, Coulson and myself, Packer and Ballantyne were able to document that visitors’ entry motivations correlated with differing learning behaviors in the museum.
Morris Hargreaves McIntyre
A wide range of museums have attempted to segment their visitors in recent years for marketing purposes with an increasing number using motivational rather than demographic categories. Some notable examples include the Shed Aquarium, Chicago and the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Ottawa. However, one of the most comprehensive recent efforts was that conducted by the English consulting firm of Morris Hargreaves McIntyre for the Tate Britain and Tate Modern, both in London.30 The goals of this study were to analyze the ways visitors construct their experience at the Tate and to understand the motivations, attitudes, perceptions, and reactions of visitors in relation to the Tate.
The research involved over 850 visitors to the two institutions, including questionnaires, observations, and focus groups. The researchers concluded that visitors to the Tate were not a homogeneous group and that visitors’ motivations, prior experiences, knowledge and interests, and social arrangements all affected the nature of the museum visit. They ended up segmenting the two Tate museum visitor groups into eight categories, what they called: 1) Aficionados; 2) Actualizers; 3) Sensualists; 4) Researchers; 5) Self-improvers; 6) Social spacers; 7) Site Seers; and 8) Families.
According to Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, Aficionados are visual arts professionals looking for inspiration and escapism. Actualizers by contrast are non-visual arts professionals, seeking inspiration or soul-food from their art visit. Sensualists are also non-visual arts professionals; they are described as “culture vultures,” seeking an uplifting and moving sensory experience. Researchers are, like Aficionados, visual arts professionals on research and development visits. Self-improvers are people wanting to develop their knowledge of the visual arts and generally, just wanting to engage in an intellectual adventure. Social spacers are visiting the museum in order to meet with others and generally, their goal is to have a good social experience. Site Seers are mainly tourists whose goal is “to do” the Tate. And finally, they created a separate category for Families which they described as groups with a mixture of ages who want a fun and educational trip for their children. Each of these eight groups had their own unique needs and visiting patterns and were characterized by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre as representing different percentages of the Tate and Tate Modern’s audience.
James Bigley, Daniel Fesenmaier, Mark Lane, and Wesley Roehl
Finally, in a little noticed but interesting study, researchers Bigley, Fesenmaier, Lane, and Roehl conducted a study in the late 1980s that examined the motivations for membership and financial donations of the individuals associated with several San Antonio, Texas museums.31 The study included “members” of a history and natural history museum, an art museum, and a collections-oriented science museum focused on transportation history and technology. Although focused on what we would consider frequent visitors rather than the general public, the fact that they based their research on the hierarchy of needs theory of Abraham Maslow and the recreational motivation theories of B.L. Driver makes their results worth noting.
Using these two theories, the researchers derived a set of seven categories that they called “motivational sub-dimensions” which they be lieved helped explain the motivations of museum members. These seven categories and some of their attributes were: Family belonging–family togetherness; Cognitive–education, curiosity of experience, aesthetics; Prosocial–community welfare, obligation, preservation; Altruism–empathic concern; Intimate group belonging-group togetherness, need to belong; Self-esteem–achievement, reinforcing self-image; and Esteem of others–status, attention, peer group, power. They created a 12-page instrument designed to measure the prevalence of each of these motivations among the 6800 members of the three museums. In all, 481 members responded to their survey. Their data analysis revealed that at least some of the members possessed all of these motivations; most quite strongly identified with some but not others. Members seemed to cluster into two broad, but non-overlapping groups—those who were primarily motivated by a desire for family belonging and cognitive interests and those motivated primarily by cognitive, prosocial, and altruistic concerns. In other words, there were those who were primarily focused on the education and learning of their family and those who were primarily concerned with promoting their own curiosity and learning, though this latter group possessed a desire to also help others within the broader community have these benefits.
What this particular study revealed, which I think has often been missed in other studies, is that cognitive interests were always a part of the equation. Rather than seeing the issue as education vs. entertainment, the data from Bigley et al shows that the education component was never really absent (at least among the museum’s most frequent visitors), although clearly the learning benefit of the museum was more pronounced in some visitors than in others. I think this is a vitally important fact that requires some emphasis, and of course, explanation. I will attempt to explain this through a metaphor. If you interviewed 100 people as they entered a restaurant and asked them why they have chosen to visit that particular restaurant on that day, what would they tell you? Predictably, their answers would cover topics such as the quality and friendliness of the service staff, the price of the food items, the atmosphere and ambiance, how convenient the restaurant is to their home, and the ease of parking. What they almost certainly would not say is that they chose this restaurant “because I was hungry.” That’s because it is assumed that the reason you go to eat out at a restaurant is to satiate your hunger, hence why mention it? Similarly, visitors to museums frequently neglect to mention that the reason they are visiting is because they hope to learn something. Why mention something that is so obvious? Unfortunately, many museum researchers have missed the obvious, mistaking a lack of statement of the fact as evidence that the fact doesn’t exist.
Learning is the large, white elephant standing in the middle of the room! All visitors to museums realize that these are educational settings; they are not confusing museums with theme parks. Some come to learn explicitly, some come to learn implicitly, but all come to learn! Although clearly museums support many leisure benefits, free-choice learning emerges as a major anticipated outcome of virtually all visitors’ museum experience.32 So important is this particular outcome that it warrants a more in-depth discussion than the other possible visitor motivations.
MUSEUMS AND FREE-CHOICE LEARNING
Over the past twenty-five years, museums have emerged as the “poster children” of the Knowledge Age leisure landscape; everyone wants to be like museums. I have argued, and continue to argue that the main reason museums are riding the crest of the current leisure wave is because the public perceives them as optimum settings for free-choice learning. Museums are where the worlds of leisure and learning intersect. Ironically, although learning-oriented activities represent a major and growing part of the leisure landscape, little research on leisure learning has been conducted. Why do people engage in free-choice learning in their leisure time? It’s fine to assert that people go to museums in order to learn, but what are they learning? Are people driven to go to places like museums so they can learn the same kinds of things in the same ways that people do in schools? What we do know, based upon extensive public leisure research conducted in Canada, is that most adults engage in leisure time free-choice learning primarily for reasons that lie outside of the goals of most formal education programs.33 They engage in free-choice learning for reasons other than the school-based goal of mastering a discipline or being able to demonstrate to others a command over a body of facts and concepts. In the world of leisure, the motivations for leisure learning appear to be far more personal.
According to tourism researcher Jan Packer, most people visit museums, parks, and other similar venues in order to “experience learning” or what she calls “learning for fun.”34 According to Packer, visitors engage in a wide range of leisure-learning-related experiences because they value and enjoy the process of learning itself rather than to learn something specific. It’s the process, not the end-product, that is important to these visitors. Five propositions about the nature of learning in museum-like settings emerged from Packer’s research. These were:
1. Learning for fun encompasses a mixture of discovery, exploration, mental stimulation, and excitement.
2. The majority of people consider learning to be, more than anything else, enjoyable.
3. Although most visitors don’t visit with a deliberate intention to learn, they do seek or are unconsciously drawn into an experience that incorporates learning.
4. Visitors identify four conditions that together are conducive to the learning for fun experience.
a. A sense of discovery or fascination.
b. Appeal to multiple senses.
c. The appearance of effortlessness.
d. The availability of choice.
5. Visitors value learning for fun because it is a potentially transformative experience.
All of these propositions have resonance with the ideas presented so far in this chapter. They also closely mirror how Maria, the 65-70-year-old Latina whose interview appears at the beginning of this chapter, views museum-going. For Maria, like many museum visitors, going to the museum is an effortless, multi-sensory, and enjoyable learning experience. The goal is not so much to learn anything in particular, but to fuel the process of discovery and fascination. Packer’s research shows that for an increasingly large number of people such as Maria, learning and leisure are becoming one and the same experience. Museums have become settings that a large percentage of the public have come to see as a place where many leisure goals can be simultaneously satisfied. They are places that support five of Beard and Mounir’s six leisure satisfactions: Psychological, Educational, Social, Relaxation, and Aesthetic.35 But the tie that binds all of these leisure satisfactions together is the unique qualities of free-choice learning.
I believe that additional clarity about why the free-choice learning that occurs in the museum context is so fundamentally different from the typical school or workplace compulsory learning can be provided by building off the ideas of British business education researcher Len Holmes. Holmes theorized that there is an inverse relationship between learning for performance and learning for identity-building.36 Learning for performance is typical in settings like school and the workplace, but it also occurs in a number of free-choice learning contexts such as sports and the arts, as well as in traditional cultural practices such as weaving and hunting. However, learning can also be motivated for purely intrinsic reasons that have little to do with performance and everything to do with the process of identity-related self-satisfaction. In particular, these ideas would suggest that in learning situations where a high degree of expectation and outside judging exists—such as is typical of the learning worlds of schooling and the workplace—there would be an increased demand for learning outcomes to be demonstrated. In these situations learning for skills and fluency will be prevalent and identity-driven learning will be depressed. By contrast, in learning situations where judging is minimal and intrinsic motivations predominate—such as is typical of the free-choice learning that occurs in museums—learning should primarily be identity-driven. Data from an investigation of the long-term meaning-making of museum visitors collected by my colleague Martin Storksdieck and me appeared to support Holmes’ framework, though there were some exceptions.37 We found that most museum visitors’ free-choice learning experiences were driven by internally-defined identity-related goals and not by externally-defined performance goals.
LEARNING AS IDENTITY-WORK
Museum expert Jay Rounds has pointed out that most people who have looked at the relationship between museums and learning typically bemoan the fact that most visitors seem to learn so little—in fact, most museum learning researchers have consistently focused on how museums can try to engineer the setting to rectify this situation.38 As Rounds writes, these experts “seem to proceed on an implicit assumption that more learning is always better … [ideally] visitors [should] learn more ‘deeply,’ more ‘comprehensively,’ more ‘systematically.’” Rounds wisely points out that unlike the experts, museum visitors are not terribly troubled by the limited extent of their learning. In fact, visitors seem quite content to only learn a few things, and even those things often in quite superficial ways. Following up on these observations, Rounds has speculated that a major reason why people go to museums is not for learning as such, though clearly learning is important, but to build identity in order to engage in what Rounds calls “identity work.”
Based on these ideas, Rounds speculates that not all of the content a museum offers will be of equal value for any given individual’s identity work. According to Rounds, the visitor must search for the potentially valuable experiences, and avoid wasting time on the others. He or she will rarely be served well by attending to, and affiliating with, all of the contents of the exhibition. Visitors do use museums in order to support their lifelong, free-choice learning, but the purpose of that learning is not to gain competence in a subject as in a school or work-based context. Museum visitors are using learning as a vehicle for building personal identity.
This is not as strange a concept as it might first seem to be. A number of leading theoreticians of learning have talked about the fact that learning and identity are actually two sides of the same coin. For example, the Russian learning theorist Lev Vygotsky, who has achieved considerable attention of late from psychologists and educators, viewed intellectual development and growth as the foundation of what it means to become a person.39 Vygotsky’s approach to learning went beyond traditional cognitive definitions and was intimately linked to the fuller range of learning activities we might see an individual engage in within the museum context. In the interview at the beginning of this chapter, when Maria is asked later to talk about a recent museum visit, she described it as follows:
Maria seemed to suggest in this excerpt that she was as content to learn about why exhibitions are changed as she was by reading labels; she was as interested in the workings of the museum as an institution as she was in what the staff wanted to inform her about fish. Although Vygotsky was not specifically concerned with identity—he never used the term in his writing—interpreters of his work such as anthropologist and Vygotsky translator James Wertsch believe that his view of learning was consistent with the idea that people would use the museum to help them become who they are not yet, in other words, to forge their identity.40
Taking these ideas even further, psychologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who built upon Vygotsky’s ideas and helped to pioneer the socio-cultural approach to learning, state that “learning and sense of identity are inseparable: They are aspects of the same phenomenon.”41 Wenger went on to define identity “as what we know, what is foreign and what we choose to know, as well as how we know it.”42 Wenger describes identity as engagement in the world; the lens through which we determine what to think about as well as with whom to interact in a knowledge-sharing activity. So like Vygotsky, Lave and Wenger’s view of learning places identity formation at the center of the process. This may or may not, as suggested by Holmes, be true for the learning that takes place in school or the workplace, but it seems highly likely that identity formation is central to learning during a leisure-time museum visit, an idea that was a least somewhat supported by museum researcher Kristin Ellenbogen’s investigations of family use of museums.43 Ellenbogen concluded that a large part of what families did in museums was build identity; particularly family identity.
However, if we take this idea of learning as identity work seriously, it raises other problems. Nearly all theory about learning, as well as efforts to measure learning, has been based upon fairly narrow notions. Most learning research is still predicated on conceptualizations of learning that make sense within academic contexts—learning is about the mastery of facts and concepts in order to orally, or in writing describe and defend an idea or proposition. However, it appears likely that within the world of free-choice learning, learning is typically, if not primarily, for personal rather than public reasons and often strongly motivated by the needs of identity formation and reinforcement. In this context, learning tends to take the form of confirmation of existing understandings, attitudes, and skills in order to allow the individual to be able to say, “Okay, I now know that I know/believe that.” The goal is not “mastery” in the traditional sense, but rather to provide the individual with a feeling of personal competence. We currently are not well-equipped to measure and assess this kind of learning. If museum-going is about free-choice learning, and free-choice learning in museums is about identity formation and maintenance, we need to understand what these processes/products actually “look like” within the specific context of a museum visit.
For many, but not all visitors, as evidenced by the interview with Maria, this identity-related learning is at the core of the value the museum has for the visitor. Over the course of the interview Maria made it clear that her goal for visiting a museum is to attain personal satisfaction, to explore freely, and as suggested by Rounds, selectively graze in the rich intellectual “field” afforded by the museum. Maria’s motivations for visiting are curiosity-driven—a curiosity that stems from a deep sense of self. She defines herself as a curious person and uses the museum as a vehicle for satisfying, as well as reinforcing that identity. In fact, it really doesn’t matter what museum. As was revealed in later parts of her interview, Maria will go to just about any museum: art, science, history, with or without others, and she’ll take whatever is available. (The Science Center just happens to be most readily available to her, and it is also a free museum.) The subject matter content of the museum is thus not the issue; rather it is her desire to go some place that helps her build her curiosity identity. Maria is typical of a large number of museum visitors whose primary reasons for visiting museums revolve around the desire to explore new and interesting places and thus, enrich their understanding of the world. Exploring is a key identity-related visitor motivation. If you remember the description of Elmira in the previous chapter, her behavior while visiting the National Aquarium in Baltimore was also characteristic of someone who is an exploring visitor. This is not an accident. The visitor experience of explorers, like all museum visitors I would assert, begins with a desire to fulfill some inner identity-related need. These identity-related needs, more than demographics or social group or even museum content, largely drive the nature of the visit.
IDENTITY-RELATED VISIT MOTIVATIONS
While reviewing all of the research summarized above, several important things become apparent:
1. There are some clear patterns emerging related to museum visitor motivations, but little consensus as to how those patterns should be described and categorized.
2. Most visitors to museums are aware of the museum’s benefits prior to visiting and enter with expectations related to these perceived benefits.
3. Visitors’ entering motivations, their museum behaviors, and their exiting learning and memories are not separate aspects of the visitor experience but rather highly correlated—a single, inextricable whole.
Mindful of these commonalities, I decided to thoroughly analyze data my colleague Martin Storksdieck and I collected from approximately 200 visitors to the California Science Center as part of a series of major National Science Foundation-funded studies. In addition to data we had on the reasons each visitor gave for their visit to the Science Center, we also had data on what they did during their visit to one of the two permanent exhibitions, data on an entire series of responses to an extensive post-visit interview, and for 25% of these visitors, extensive interview data collected approximately two years after the initial visit. In sum, we had a very rich data set with which to try and make sense of the relationships between why people came to the Science Center, what they did there, and what and how they ultimately made meaning from the experience.44
As was the case for all who have taken the trouble to ask people why they are visiting, we had many answers, including virtually all the responses my colleagues before me had heard. We commonly heard “It’s a great place for kids,” “I’ve heard it’s really fun,” “I’m interested in science and thought I’d drop by to see what’s here,” and “I was in the park and thought I’d check it out.” Less commonly-heard answers included “I’m a science teacher and I’m always looking for neat new ideas” and “I find places like this really cool, it helps me get my head straight.” However, my goal was not to just sort (whether physically or by computer algorithm) these answers into convenient categories, but to organize them in a way that holistically considered the museum visitor experience. Rather than just accepting on face value the reason someone gave for their visit such as, “It was a nice day so I decided to visit the Science Center,” I wanted to delve more deeply. What was this person’s real motivation for visiting? What evidence could I glean about those motivations from looking at how they behaved and what they said they remembered from their visit? In other words, was it really a nice day that prompted them to visit the Science Center? Alternatively, if it was such a nice day, why not visit the beach or hang out in the nearby park? If a nice day was truly their motivation for visiting, was there any indication that they used this reason to direct how they used and thought about the Science Center that was different from someone who wasn’t worried about the weather? My hypothesis was that there needed to be more lurking below the surface. I wanted to determine if visitors’ motivations could be related to each person’s deeply-felt identity-related needs—needs which they perceived that a visit to the Science Center would support.
After reviewing my interviews of the California Science Center visitors, as well as considering previous research studies, I concluded that the myriad ways visitors described their expectations and motivations for a museum visit tended to cluster into five basic identity-related categories of leisure benefits that they perceived were supported by the Science Center. The Science Center was
1. an intellectually challenging place that had the potential for satisfying personal curiosity and interest in science and technology;
2. an educational place where one’s family (particularly children) and/or friends could both enjoy themselves and learn new things;
3. an important new attraction in the Los Angeles area that anyone who wanted to experience that which is exemplary, and most important in science and technology should visit;
4. a place where one could go to further specific intellectual needs, particularly in the areas of science, technology, and education;
5. a place where one could escape much of the everyday “rat race” and be intellectually and spiritually recharged and rejuvenated.
The Science Center, and as I’ve subsequently determined other museum-like settings as well, was visited because it was perceived by visitors as affording opportunities to fulfill
1. the need to satisfy personal curiosity and interest in an intellectually challenging environment;
2. the wish to engage in a meaningful social experience with someone whom you care about in an educationally supportive environment;
3. the aspiration to be exposed to the things and ideas that exemplify what is best and intellectually most important within a culture or community;
4. the desire to further specific intellectual needs in a setting with a specific subject matter focus; and/or
5. the yearning to physically, emotionally, and intellectually recharge in a beautiful and refreshing environment.
Museums are settings that allow visitors to play the role of one or more of the following: 1) Explorer; 2) Facilitator; 3) Experience seeker; 4) Professional/Hobbyist; and 5) Recharger.45 These five categories are not exactly identical to the categorizations described by the other researchers as summarized earlier in this chapter. In creating these five categories, I have tried to combine the attributes of the visitor leisure-related motivations discovered by myself and others into a new, and what I believe to be a more conceptually-consistent set of identity-related categories. For example, it is my opinion that the motivation of learning/education is so intrinsic to museums that they are more or less embedded within each of my five categories. For those visitors who seek to explore or satisfy their professional or hobby interests, learning is probably very important. While for others, such as those who wish to sample the environment or recharge their batteries, learning is more of a leitmotif. Either way, learning is still a major reason why these particular settings are chosen by the visitor.
It is likely that none of these categories are totally “pure” in the sense that many museum visitors perceive museums to afford most, if not all, of these attributes. Hence, their visit motivations combine some mix of all these reasons; for example, the museum is not only a good place to explore, it’s also is a great place for socializing and for recharging one’s life “batteries.” That said, it appears that on any given day, most visitors tend to walk through the door of a museum with one or another of these leisure identity-related motivations predominating. My data suggested to me, and my continuing research only reconfirms this initial observation, that each of the five major categories represents a fundamental, separate view by many visitors of what needs the museum best supports on any particular day. And, as I will describe in more detail in the next chapter, this categorization has now been validated by research across a wide range of museums.
What makes this typology important is not that I’ve chosen to analyze visitors’ motivations and needs differently than other researchers based upon my own ad-hoc analysis of the data. This is not just another marketing segmentation study, with clever new labels for visitor groupings. Rather, I believe that my framework is based on a sound combination of theory and data which accurately represents the deeply-held, identity-related perceptions and beliefs of the public for why it is valuable to visit a museum. Consequently, these categories reflect the reasons people have for visiting museums, and they also reflect the basic leisure attributes the public perceives that museums best afford. They provide a glimpse into this hybrid thing I have called the museum visitor experience. These categories are not a complete description of museums, since all museums are more multifaceted and capable of supporting more than these five categories of behaviors and benefits. And they are certainly not fully descriptive of every visitor, as each is clearly more complex and capable of enacting more than just these five roles. But what this simplified model does successfully describe is that unique place where, at this moment in history, most visitors and most museums come together.
Thus, visitors enter the museum expecting to satisfy one of these leisure identity-related needs; they proceed to use the museum as a setting for enacting these needs; they exit, and weeks and months later, the meanings they make of their visit are shaped by these expectations. These five categories of visitor motivations do a remarkably robust job of representing the majority of leisure attributes most people currently ascribe to museum contexts. It appears to accurately capture a critical part of the reality of how people who visit museums use the setting. The result is that most visitors describe a successful museum visit as one that allowed them to enact the identities—the traits, roles, attitudes, and group memberships—associated with one or more of these categories. And perhaps most surprising, this way of organizing museum visits provides a framework for understanding how to make sense of a large percentage of the long-term recollections visitors have of their museum experience. To clarify why this is so requires that we look at each of these five categories more closely from the perspective of the individual visitor rather than the museum.